


you'll always be my favorite ghost

by discowing (ameliafromafairytale)



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Near Death Experiences, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-01 11:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18334145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliafromafairytale/pseuds/discowing
Summary: No one had ever asked him aboutafter that. Dick wasn't even sure anyone would believe him if he said anything. He’d woken up, after all, just three minutes and forty-seven seconds later, and that’s all that mattered to everyone else in the end. He’d woken up.But in those three minutes and forty-seven seconds, Dick had…gone somewhere.





	you'll always be my favorite ghost

**Author's Note:**

> (title from florence + the machine "big god")
> 
> i finally read forever evil for the first time the other day and wow what a monumentally fucking stupid story to pull the unmasking bullshit in. i'm not a fan. i am, however, a fan of dick and damian's father/son/brother thing, so...i thought i'd do something with that.
> 
> (extremely platonic dick and damian ONLY here)

Dick opens his eyes to find himself sitting on the manor’s roof. Gentle sunlight warms his shoulders and a clear blue sky hangs over his head. This alone – the weather, the location, his inability to remember _how_ he got up here – should be enough to set off warning bells in his head, but his mind is foggy. Though he can hear birds chirping and the faint sound of feminine laughter from somewhere down on the ground, and can feel a soft breeze ghosting over his skin, he feels suddenly that time isn’t passing, or, at least, that it’s not passing in the way he’s accustomed to. Everything is moving, yet everything is frozen at the same time, and for some reason it doesn’t feel _wrong,_ just…different.

Then, what feels like both an eternity and yet only a moment later, Dick hears a voice he thought he’d never hear again.

“ _Grayson!_ ”

He’s hardly managed to scramble to his feet before a small body crashes into him and strong arms wrap around his waist like unyielding steel.

“Damian?” he gasps, tears burning at his eyes and overflowing down his cheeks as the face buried in his stomach turns up to reveal Damian. The boy looks the most curious combination of elated and furious Dick thinks he’s ever seen, his mouth twitching like he can’t decide if he wants to smile or scowl. “ _Damian_ ,” Dick repeats, reaching down to swoop his baby brother up in his arms and spin him around in delight. “Damian, oh god, Damian,” he sobs, “You’re _here_ , I missed you so much, I – “

“You _imbecile_ ,” Damian says, his cheek pressed tight against Dick’s, tight enough that Dick’s not sure if the moisture on his cheeks is just from his own tears or if Damian’s crying too. “I missed you too, Grayson, but you weren’t –“ he hiccups, “ – You weren’t supposed to come here so soon.”

“The kid’s right,” _another_ voice Dick thought he’d never hear again says from off to the side, “You should listen to him more often. Your mother and I had hoped we wouldn’t be seeing you _here_ for a while yet.”

Dick turns and barely manages to keep hold of Damian when he sees his parents standing there, smiling, arms around each other’s waists.

“Dad,” he breathes, “ _Mom!_ ”

“Hello, my little Robin,” his mother says, drawing close and pulling both him and Damian in for a hug, his father just behind her. “Look at you, all grown up!” The feeling of his parents’ arms around him is a memory he hadn’t realized had faded so much, and the love and tenderness he can feel in it sends him into a fresh round of sobbing.

“What’s with the tears, son?” his father says, “Aren’t you happy to see us?”

It’s stupid, Dick knows. He’s spent years and years and _years_ thinking of all the things he wants to talk about with his parents, all the stories he’d like to tell them, and yet in this moment he can barely string a sentence together.

Everyone who’s ever commented on his appearance in relation to his parents has always said that he’s the spitting image of his father. In this moment, however, seeing their faces ( _actually_ seeing their faces, not just a flat photograph that he never really felt captured the essence of his family), Dick can see that he looks more like his mom. He’s got his father’s coloring, olive skin and inky black hair, but his mouth and eyes and facial expressions are just like his mom’s.

He smiles.

“Damian,” Dick says as his parents pull back, “these are my parents, John and Mary Grayson. Mom, Dad, this is…” he pauses, trying to figure out how to classify Damian. Legally, he’s the boy’s brother, but that year he’d spent as the Batman to Damian’s Robin is not so easily shrugged away and boxed up to forget about. He hasn’t spoken a word of it to anyone, least of all Bruce, but the truth is that he’s been mourning Damian more as a son than as a brother. “This is Damian,” he settles for. From the way his parents look at him, they seem to understand. He thinks Damian probably does too.

He still hasn’t put Damian down, but from the way the kid’s legs are wrapped around his waist, he doubts it’ll be happening any time soon. It’s fine. Dick’s not certain he’ll be able to let go any time soon, himself, and even if he was, he'd never waste an opportunity like this when Damian is actually feeling _clingy_.

“We’ve met,” his mother says with a teasing smile. “Damian here found us not too long after…well, after. He’s been telling us _all about_ what you’ve been getting up to since we last saw you.” Damian smirks.

“Ahah…well,” Dick says, shy laughter bubbling up. “Only the good things, I hope?” He always _has_ wondered what his parents would think of what he’s done with his life…

“We’re proud of you, Dick,” his father says. “More than you can possibly know. Immensely grateful, too, for what you did to make sure there was justice for what was done to us. How we were blessed with a miracle like you as our son, I’ll never know, but…we love you, Dick.”

Dick’s chest _burns_ with the storm of emotion his father’s words awakens in him.

“Damian is right, though,” his mother says. “It’s too early. You’re not supposed to be here so soon.” She moves close again, and somehow maneuvers Damian from Dick’s hip to hers. “Look,” she says, gesturing to his hands, “you’re already being pulled back.”

It’s true. His hands are fading quickly, and already the world seems slippery and increasingly distant. The feeling of _difference_ is rapidly morphing into _wrongness_ , and his vision starts to tunnel.

Damian, in his mother’s arms, with his father just beside them, his hand on Damian’s shoulder, is an image Dick hopes he’ll never forget. He doesn’t want to look away, doesn’t want to stop seeing how Damian goes soft in Mary Grayson’s maternal embrace.

“I…love you, Grayson,” Damian says. “I’m sorry I never said it before.” Dick’s hardly there at this point, but he still manages to cry at the words.

“My little Robin,” his mother says, her voice distant as his surroundings bleed and fade like watercolors, “You make us so proud.”

“Try not to come visit us here again for a long time…”

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

_“Dick?”_

_“B’man…?_

_“I told you I had it under control. There was no need to worry…about him.”_

 

* * *

 

People say that Denver, Colorado is one of the sunniest cities in the country; over three hundred days of sunshine a year, they boast. A good year is one with just over a month’s worth of cloudy days.

If that’s true, then Gotham City is Denver’s evil twin; over three hundred days of rain and clouds and smog a year, and on the rare chance the sun peeks through, it’s hardly for more than an hour at a time. Not even the sun likes visiting Jersey, it seems.

Still, there are always outlier days. Days such as this, Dick contemplates as he rests in the shade of a tree on the manor grounds. It’s the first week of June, which means they only have a week or two at most before patrols become hot, sweaty messes again, but for now the weather is balmy and Dick is enjoying the sun’s brief visit.

A couple dozen feet away, Damian is playing some sort of keep-away game with Titus. Dick had been playing with them earlier, but for now he was content to sit to the side and observe, more than happy just to be able to hear the sound of Damian’s laughter again. In this moment, feeling more at peace than he has since, well…probably before Damian died, Dick slips into a comfortable doze, letting the soothing noise of Damian and Titus’s play wash over him as he slips into light slumber.

When Dick next opens his eyes, Damian and Titus have gone quiet. Titus is nowhere to be seen, probably back inside, and Damian is now sitting beside him, quietly drawing in his sketchbook. In that moment, with the image of sunlight dappling over them, with Damian’s face peaceful yet focused as his pencil skims across the page and birdsong twitters in the background, Dick feels a sudden staggering sense of unreality. This moment is real, he _knows_ – it’s been months since he came back from Spyral, and even more time since Damian came back to life – but for just a second, another moment overlays it, and Dick is left feeling like the ground is spinning beneath him as he recalls the memory/dream/hallucination he’d buried deep down months ago.

When Luthor had shoved that pill down his throat and refused to remove his hand from his mouth until he swallowed it, Dick hadn’t panicked as much as he probably should have. He hadn’t wanted to die, of course, but…at that point he hadn’t really wanted to live, either. He’d been held captive and tortured by sick, twisted versions of his friends and family, he’d been unmasked for the entire world to see, and of course there was the sick _wrongness_ that had been pulsing at the back of his consciousness for what had felt like an eternity at that point – Damian was dead. Dying a handful of feet away from Bruce, both of them powerless to stop it, was the last thing he wanted. But…seeing his parents again, seeing _Damian_ again…that part didn’t seem so bad.

So, when it came down to either swallowing the pill or letting Luthor suffocate him, Dick had chosen the less painful way out and swallowed the pill, passing mere moments later. After that…well, no one had ever asked him about _after that_. Dick wasn’t sure anyone would believe him if he said anything. He’d woken up, after all, just three minutes and forty-seven seconds later, and that’s all that mattered to everyone else in the end. He’d woken up.

But in those three minutes and forty-seven seconds, Dick had…gone somewhere.

In that moment, looking up at Damian as he sketches, Dick is there all over again.

He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Damian looks over at him in alarm and demands to know what’s wrong.

“Grayson?” he asks, his hand hovering over Dick’s shoulder. “Grayson, what’s wrong?”

Dick just shakes his head, pushing himself up until he’s sitting. He pulls Damian close, heedless of the squawk of protest the boy makes, and hugs him tightly.

Damian is quiet for a moment even as his face is pressed into Dick’s chest. His fists clench in Dick’s shirt.

“Grayson,” he grumbles, though it’s without bite, “I’m alive. It has been over a year since Father brought me back,” he says. “Quit worrying. I’m okay.” Dick only ever went to Damian after a nightmare about the boy’s death twice, but the words don’t calm him this time. Instead, Dick only cries harder, hating how _weak_ he’s being in front of Damian. He shouldn’t have to see him like this.

“It was so _real_ ,” he chokes. With some difficulty, Damian manages to get one of Dick’s hands free from the crushing hug and maneuvers it until his fingers rest over Damian’s jugular. He knows Dick can feel the regular, strong _th-thump_ of his heart under his fingers.

“Not anymore,” Damian swears. “I’m alive, and I don’t plan on that stopping any time soon. Cease your fretting, now.”

Dick’s tears don’t stop immediately, but they do slow, even if his grip on Damian hardly loosens. They sit in silence for long minutes, the only sound besides Dick’s hiccupping breaths being that of the wind rustling the leaves and the distant sound of birdsong. It’s the kind of tolerance Damian only shows Dick and occasionally (though increasingly) Bruce.

Finally, Dick clears his throat and speaks.

“Damian,” he begins, “do you…remember anything from after you died?”

Damian goes stiff in his arms.

“Why do you ask, Grayson.” It’s not a question.

“Just…answer me, please,” Dick says. “Do you?”

“…I don’t know,” Damian admits eventually. “I have dreams, sometimes. They’re vivid, more clear than any normal dream, and I see people I’ve never met, some who seem to have never even existed, but…” he lets out a small breath. “I have no way to prove they're anything more than dreams.”

Dick frowns. “People you’ve never met?” he asks, “People who’ve never existed? What do you mean?”

Damian wiggles out from Dick’s grasp and reaches for his sketchbook. “Here,” he says, flipping back to almost the beginning. He shows him a few pages of sketch portraits of a boy Damian’s age. The sketches are all in pencil, but Dick gets the impression the child’s hair should be a bright flaming red. In the corner of one page is written _Colin?_ in Damian’s precise handwriting.

There’s a handful of portraits of an unfamiliar dark-haired woman and then Bruce’s parents. Pages of a young woman, somewhere around Jason's age, caught in kata after kata, a proud yet kind smirk on her face. Damian has portrayed her form and movement beautifully, but somehow Dick knows that this woman’s grace is impossible to capture in a still image. And that she _loves_ trashy reality television. Right next to her is another smiling woman, this one blonde and bouncy and closer to Tim's age. Her favorite food is waffles, and Dick knows instinctively that that the Batgirl suit she wears should be lined in eggplant purple. The graceful fighter is captioned _Cain_ and the smiling woman is _Brown_. He'd only seen Damian and his parents up on that roof, but something in his mind links these women to the laughter he'd heard up on that roof. It’s disturbing, seeing these unfamiliar faces and feeling how they make some unreachable part of his brain itch, but it’s the page after that that has Dick’s heart leaping into his throat.

He turns the page, and there, rendered in loving detail, is a drawing of his parents. Damian’s captured them mid-laugh, his mother leaning into his father’s chest as her cheeks dimple in delight. It’s perfect, and Dick’s breath shudders in his chest as his fingers just barely brush across the page.

“…How?” He asks. The only picture he personally has of his parents, the only one that he didn’t pull off the internet, is the one Tim’s parents took of the Flying Graysons and a toddler-aged Tim, and he’s fairly certain he never showed it to Damian. He could’ve found pictures online, but he – the way he’s captured their personalities here suggests a more intimate, _personal_ knowledge.

“So they _are_ your parents,” Damian says, like he’s confirming some hunch.

“Do you remember?” Dick asks again. Struggling, “Do you remember _me?_ ”

Damian looks at him for a long moment, jade-chip eyes searching his face for some unknown detail.

“…It wasn’t a dream, then,” he sighs at length, leaning up against Dick.

“No,” Dick says. “No, I don’t think it was.”

They’re quiet again for a while.

“I tried to forget it,” Dick says eventually. “It hurt to remember. I was so _happy_ seeing you and my parents again, and being ripped away from that, back into reality where you were dead and I’d just been unmasked…it was easier to tuck it away and pretend it was just a dream, to go along with Bruce’s plan to force me undercover, then actually deal with it. Deal with anything that happened, really.”

“What _did_ happen?” Damian asks. “The truth this time, Grayson.”

“The Crime Syndicate,” Dick shrugs. “’Grid’ took over the mechanical part of Cyborg and separated from him to become its own entity. It strapped me into a bomb that was tied to my heartbeat…either I died, or the bomb went off and killed me _and_ everyone else in the room. Nothing B was doing could disable it since it kept fixing itself every time he did anything.” Dick shudders, remembering how _trapped_ he’d felt in that moment. “Luthor forced me to swallow a pill that stopped my heart. I was clinically dead for three minutes and forty-seven seconds until Luthor shot me with adrenaline and started my heart again once I’d been taken out of the deactivated bomb.”

“So you _did_ die,” Damian says, almost accusingly. Dick shrugs.

“Technically, I guess. It hardly counts compared to what happened to you and Jason, though.”

“You were dead enough to see your parents and me; I think that counts.” Damian scowls. “Why haven’t you spoken to Todd and Drake about this? They’re both under the impression that your death was entirely faked.”

“Tim and Jay are both well within their right to be mad at me,” Dick says. “The ‘truth’ won’t make that much of a difference.”

“That’s not true, and you know it,” Damian snaps. “Father never mentioned _anything_ about the bomb to us!”

“Damian,” Dick says sharply. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

Damian scowls deeply, but eventually lets out a heavy sigh.

“I thought I was going crazy,” he says instead. “I woke up and everyone was there but you, and then…then Father told me you were _dead_. I didn’t want to believe it, and then I started having the dreams about…wherever we were, and I remembered how you didn’t _stay_ , but…” he lets out a frustrated sigh. “When I asked Todd if he remembered anything from when he was dead, he said he didn’t. When I tried telling him about my dreams, he laughed. I was certain they were just a figment of my imagination, a fantasy I dreamed up to…cope.”

“Jay’s situation was different,” Dick says contemplatively. “Who knows what that means, really…” He sighs, then squeezes Damian’s shoulder. “Did you mean what you said? At the end, before I…left?”

Dick can feel Damian’s face go warm against his collarbone.

“…Yes,” the boy admits. “It was a moment of emotional vulnerability. I would not have been so candid had I known I would see you again just months later.”

“Awww,” Dick pouts. “That’s harsh, kiddo. But, you know…I love you too,” he says. “No matter what – I love you, Damian Wayne. Don’t question it, don’t _ever_ forget it.”

“…I won’t.”

**Author's Note:**

> the unnamed woman in damian's sketchbook is supposed to be his maternal grandmother, melisande (whether she's the melisande ra's met at woodstock...is up to you). 
> 
> i thought about continuing this w a confrontation w jay and tim but it just didn't seem to fit...maybe a sequel. 
> 
> anyway. dick has terminal eldest sibling disease meaning he CANNOT let his family thinks he needs anything ever or that his issues are anything more than a minor inconvenience. hashtag same
> 
> check me out on tumblr @dykewing! (multi)fandom (but mostly just batfam lol), or @ohmightyoracle for my writing blog. twitter is @dykegrayson, main twitter is @disco_wing :)
> 
> minor edits (5/11): fixed some phrasing, added a reference to cass and steph in the beginning scene.


End file.
